by the way, if there is a fire there and leaking gas underneath the street it's going to blow up. you know, comforting things like that. so i asked him to be in charge of finding out what he could about the gas mains underneath the street and i'm still waiting for that report, by the way. [laughter] so the fourth thing was the network and the volunteers and the organization. the fifth thing was really to get to the substance. you know, what plans did we have to make for individual businesses to have some access in acceptable ways based on engineering that was sort of ongoing, and then we had some bigger plans going on. and the whole project then became one of -- you remember october 17, and then what was the day after thanksgiving? we didn't know it was black friday in those days. it was just thanksgiving. we knew we had the downtown

open in some fashion or form. and so then the enterprise shifted to getting these pavilions set up and all the volunteers and structures, leases and use city parking lots and the pavilions. it was an impossible thing that just couldn't have happened except organically with everybody doing stuff. as much as we can empower them, keeping in mind we had to maintain some control and decorum and some safety features. and, you know, thank goodness nothing really bad happened. we were there until 10:00 at night the night before thanksgiving doing the final touches on paving and we had a downtown. accessible in parts by the day after thanksgiving. so that was sort of the sprint. the long term, and i'm keeping me from my parking meter so i'll do this quickly. the long term is that -- the

long-term plan for santa cruz and then watsonville is really the marathon. and you talk about what makes good plans and good planning is really good process and you have to design the process to respond to the conditions in your community or your community. you could have multiple plans in a larger city, for example, and then try to coordinate those altogether. now, the question here -- seen here is, how do you involve the community? and there's sort of this whole notion of bottom up instead of top down. actually you need both. you need both. we sort of overreacted in the 1970's about experts or just paid hacks and that sort of things and there are still consultants out there that will just listen to the community and all they get is something from the community which is all wonderful expression of values

and valuable but recovery is all about investment, right, particularly in the business district? you have people to risk real money on real projects in your downtown which means you need expertise on retail. we tried to design a process that involved the whole community. we had this vision of santa cruz committee of 36. a year and a half to do it. people got a little impatient over that period of time. i kept telling them, the avocado seed in the jar, you have to watch the things go underneath before anything comes up out of the ground. they didn't even buy it. it was a good try. and then it's the long haul of carrying this all out, but redid have a knock down, dragout process in the community. berkeley, tom, you know what that's all about. an academic community challenged to do something other than have a good conversation. you know, the status quo is not an option. so just having a conversation

is only part of it. you have to actually get to real projects so that's what we did. it is pretty successful. we're still now 20 years later looking to do retail enhancements, changing some things because, you know, planning doesn't start and end at one period of time. so that's what we did and we're still standing. thank you. [applause] >> ok. that concludes the formal presentation part of this event. now, let me make you all work a little bit. not really. i did want to say, though, i want to acknowledge some things. the panel, it's always interesting when you're tapped to do a panel like this and you wonder if it's going to fit, are all the pieces going to work together? i think you all guys touched on very important issues that really speak to this issue of whole community. so i want to give you guys an

applause and really thank you for taking the time to be here today. i also because i know some of you out there kind of want to acknowledge some people and some of the things that they've done i think that are very important contributions. nancy ward over here was my colleague in the state for a lot of years and has now been -- with fema for 10 years? and i got to tell you, nancy really did a lot to push forward funding for planning in the bay area when they were overlooking us and looking at the other areas in the country. because of her efforts we have now had a pretty steady stream of funding coming through. also want to acknowledge mike deyton in the state for this as well. but we've done i think some of the best regional planning in the country here in the bay area. and i have to -- in the interest of full disclosure, i am an employer of u.r.f. we have do a lot of those plans. with that said i think we've

done an incredible amount of work here in the bay area to address the a lot of deficiencies and issues that became apparent after loma prieta. also i think it's important to acknowledge a lot of our community partners and having worked down here in the bay area for a couple years as part of the bay initiative. we have emily white and greg smith here from red cross who are part of our advisory team. alyssa domo who carries the flag forward being executive director and working with a lot of nonprofits in san francisco and even extending elsewhere now. now a lot of the work that's being done is being done throughout the state. also here hodge who is a huge partner from the faith community here in the bay area representing hunters point bayview area and just did a tremendous job in boosting

awareness and preparing that community for a lot of different hazards that could strike them. also yokilly recommendo. another intermediary group that works with nonprofits. once again, the bay area is just an incubator, just so important in terms of this whole concept. i also wanted to mention a lot of the work that's done in the private sector. michael cummings. i worked with him when i was with fritz institute. he has gone to fema. that's an important effort that fema has undertaken. something that the deputy administrator was talking about. i think the state should bring somebody in there as well. [laughter] yeah, right. i have toe say here in the state we are lucky to have the california resiliencey law and

peter who has done a lot of incredible work with the private sector. so once again, so many good ideas, so many things have happened here. just remarkable. state of the art. now, the work that you have to do, we have some questions. my colleague prepared some questions. we don't have a lot of time. we have one mike there in the center, and we had way too many questions. we have 15 minutes or so. but i think maybe the best question to ask, jim, is the last one that we had which is like looking back at the last two-plus decades since loma prieta, you know, what concerns us collectively as a group, you know, most about our current response and recovery capacity and what do we think our greatest stride has been the time as regional community to engage bay area communities to become stronger and more resilient? what has worked and what do we really need to focus on for the

future? that is really what it comes down to. i am just going to throw that out to our panelist or to the audience. first off, let me see if there's any comments from the panel. come on. >> i just think we've come so much further on the communication side of it and i think -- when i think not being able to call someone for seven or eight hours and now the idea that you can text, i think that's one of the biggest challenges, how do we take that new technology -- not new -- but newer and use it in a way that can help us both before and after and i think that's a huge opportunity for all of us. >> i just like to say one thing, too, that i think people now realize and have studied a lot more about recovery and emergency response and recovery and i think that's really, really important. and i like to think of this sprint marathon as a kind of

relay that you don't necessarily, you know, have everything worked out, obviously, in the preevent planning but you understand that transitions have to act quickly. the baton gets passed from one group to the next in terms of the focus of the work and so on and that's a really good mindset to have going in so you're not going in there thinking it all has to go this way or that way, that you're flexible. >> i have to say that san francisco and the bay area is very culturally confident. we have lots of language capability from staff. even from the city level to nonprofit level. i would still say that cities and counties still need to really work on the ability to shelter their population. watsonville, it was about 8% of their population that was homeless for a long period of time. we have to work how wrer going to manage that large population for a long period of time.

>> one of the things that happened and i think was important happened in the legislature which was the standardized emergency management system. once we got that in place when people could actually communicate and work, because that was one of the biggest problems is people couldn't communicate. >> thank you. >> hi. i'm glenn pomeroy, the state created earthquake insurer for homeowners. we are here talking about preparedness to recovery. speaking in terms of the individual, the future survivors that was spoke about so eloquently. just a quick comment. the only way that those individual homeowners or apartment dwellers that could have the financial strength to rebuild is if they have an earthquake insurance policy that is provided in our part by this nonprofit state traded california earthquake authority. earthquake insurance is

specifically excluded from your homeowners insurance. it's important for people to realize that. the only way they have financial security for earthquake damage is to purchase a separate earthquake insurance policy. they created a. we're a nonprofit carrier. we are trying to make the cost is affordable. it isn't cheap. senator feinstein in the senate and three republican members in the house have introduced identical legislation cause the earthquake insurance act. we would save $100 million a year for california policyholders so i would encourage all californians to get behind that effort. let's make earthquake insurance more affordable and more broadly available, get more homes prepared to recover following an earthquake and, yes, we need to do mitigation too. i want to come by and visit about all the efforts we have under way both on the mitigation side and insurance side. working together we can get more homes protected.

>> sir, how much money do you have available in the event of an earthquake? >> 15 years later, california earthquake authority has $10 billion of claims. good for what we estimate to be one in 500-year event so our friends from fema understand how significant that is. we're ready for a big one. the problem is most people don't buy insurance. 90% of the homes in california are not insured. i don't want you to discourage people but encourage people. >> i encourage people to strengthen their homes. that's what i want them to do. >> we're with that on mitigation too. i'd like to visit you. >> i didn't like the legislation. i thought it was too costly. didn't have enough protection. and you had to put this money aside. $10 billion would go like that. $10 billion is just chicken feed. >> actually, for homes that we insure, for the number of homes we insure we could handle another northridge and loma

prieta. financial security and strength is not a problem. it's the problem that most people so far have not elected to purchase it. that's the work we have. >> you guys are rolling out a mitigation program now, right? >> we have a terrific mitigation program. getting ready to launch. we have $22 million to provide cash incentives for people to mitigate their homes. so we got a lot of things going on. thank you. >> before you start, one thing i wanted to mention, i have a former colleague, lori johnson, not to put you on the spot. lori has done a lot of research on cobay and also on new orleans. i just want to know, if there's anything specific you have that could add to this discussion. you don't have to. i know i'm putting you on the spot. given the opportunity. all right. [laughter] ok. >> good morning. this question is a two-part

question. probably would be best directed to barbara. one of the things is, as being an administrator of a church in the bay area, a vulnerable community, being part of the inner faith council, have you contacted or have m.o.u.'s with any other churches in which you could have health departments set up in there with emergency medical supplies or anything in case of an earthquake in the area so that we would already be a part of the city's plan? and my next question is, we are on third street here in the city and third street is one of the only corridors that you could leave the city without going over a bridge or overpass. to my understanding, third street is not one of the emergency corridors. instead, on a peninsula, in having a street like that, i wonder why. >> i can answer your first question.

what we just done is incorporated the individual -- the organizations that have contracts with us. we're now launching a community preparedness program and that's something we'll work with d.e.m. in terms of a citywide m.o.u. that will go to faith-based programs and i'm sure that ann will be very supportive of that. right now we're borking with our community-based organization -- working with our community-based organizations so they know where all our radios are in that community so we already started in the southeast. but that's an excellent point to look at the faith-based churches and have m.o.u.'s work with them and that's something that clearly needs to be happening. i see ann in the front row. she's shaking her head to that. as we move from the community-based organizations that have contracts with us, then we have to work with organizations like yours. sure to come. >>ry don't know if i can -- i don't know if i can address the corridor issue.

>> hi. my name is lynn. i am proud to say i have been a member of the nert program since 1994 when i graduated with my husband. at the time it cost us $25 each and it was the best investment we have ever made. and i'm so proud that it is free to all of our city residents as well as the people that work here. i am proud to say that our nert program as part of the certificate programs in the bay area has been an open dialogue with each other. we know core, we know panda. we know the people at berkeley. we continue to learn. i think we have already had this whole community approach since 1989 and we just continue to grow it. which brings me to my biggest question which is that we have reached 20,000 people in san francisco through word of mouth. 20,000 people is an excellent force multiplier but when you look at a population that grows to more than a million during the day, when you have tourists and schools and people visits who don't know what to do, it's not going to be enough. how do we reach more people to

get them into nert training, give them the incentives to get them out of their house into training classes? can we require this of businesses, require it as schools, require it as institutions and give them a payback for it? can we give them insurance reductions? can we give them tax breaks? can we give small businesses rebates? if people are trained and certified in nert and stay active, how can we bring people in the training when it does hit we really are ready? because the time we spend now in getting ready and being prepared that will shorten that recovery time in a very great and significant way. >> i would just say we wrestle with getting more people in our community to get involved. we have our drills and it's the people that are engaged that come out to the drills. i don't know about incentives for businesses but i think what we find is when the businesses supporting it you can see it.

i can go down the wharf and say who really is supporting it because we see 10 and 12 people coming through the nert program. i think any type of incentive would be welcome. i don't know what the exact answer would be but it would help us. >> i think you need to go to the legislature, state legislature to get the kind of incentives you want. local municipalities don't have the tools to provide the incentives. there are a lot of things they can do, permit, but they can't reduce the property tax on their owns. you can't reduce benefits unless you have a 2/3 vote of the people in the area. i think you need to go to the legislature. i would be remiss to say we keep thinking 22 years ago. we still haven't repaired the bridge yet. the bridge will be ready hopefully next year. so 22, 23 years later. >> i would just like to say it is extremely difficult to get people engaged in advance to do

the things that need to be done and then there's a lot of people, as you mentioned, that will be visits or what not -- visiting or what not that would have no clue. so i think probably as a strategy maybe the next level of the certain nert training is to actually think about ways of postdisaster immediate communication and engagement with people so they can be brought up to speed about the fact that this structure does exist and there is a set of procedures and whatever that then help people to get the big picture because i don't think whether it's the legislature or anything else, that's a hard one to get to. so i would say try to think about what you can do anticipating the problem you're going to have and think of some pragmatic responses.

>> good morning. my name is danielle hutchins. i'm from the association of bay area governments and i just wanted to respond to mr. jacks' opening question about what else we need to do to be prepared for a next earthquake. i would like to advocate for a regional perspective. obviously cities must be prepared, neighborhoods must be prepared to take care of their own cities to bring those back. but we have a number of regional issues that we're going to face and lifelines and our utilities and road networks, housing, regional economic development. and i think it's really important we look at that as our bay area region, as our bay area identity. so along those lines i wanted to -- passed out an invitation to a workshop where we're going to begin to look at some of those regional issues. it will be at november 1 at ames. i hope everyone can attend. >> the importance at looking at a regional level is half of our work force lives outside of san francisco. so looking from a regional

perspective, i think that would be really important too. >> i would say one of the biggest gaps we have is the lack of that regional recovery planning which i know there are various -- i know there are various initiatives nowadays moving forward. i think it's very important. i also think at the state level we really need to think more substantive recovery plan that would, you know, seek to tie a lot of these pieces together. >> i might just add that there's a thing called the joint policy committee. it's immediating up with the four agencies, regional -- it's meeting up with the four agencies, regional agencies. now implementing, trying to figure out how we can implement the bay plan that was just approved by vcdc to figure out how we can implement the plan. in addition to that they are looking at climate change and disaster preparedness too. we do have some regional activity that's taking place in

addition to that work. >> there is something to be said in bringing together resilience. economic resilience, climate change resilience. it's really all about being resilient. i think if we can put those into one conversation we can be stronger. >> i want to thank all very much for doing a great job as our moderator and for the entire panel, i had the opportunity to work with barbara garcia for 16 years at the health department and heard her very compelling story about the response to loma prieta. so really happy that you were here and each and every one of you were able to provide very unique perspectives that began to give us the whole picture of what a full community response looks like. i'm sure you'll join me in giving a big hand to our panel.

[applause] i don't know about you all but i think this was a wonderful opportunity to share ideas this morning, to see old friends, meet new friends and really continue this dialogue which is so important in our recovery. there will be more of this in the future. thank you all for coming and encourage you all to be prepared and to think about our response and our working together. thank you very much. have a great day. [applause]

>> i get really concerned one ip -- hear people say the payroll tax is a job killer. maybe in some industries the payroll tax might be a disincentive on business going forward, but i would not be surprised if we came out of the

whole discussion about remaking our tax for next year that it involves a combination of a payroll tax, commercial occupancy tax, and gross receipts tax. all of that could be in a remade form of our business tax structure. >> that is a good question to ask. i will ask this monday. >> i was born in of los angeles. i was in a mexican-american, a chicano town. my dad was a launch your worker. my mother was an office worker at usc. my parents were divorced when i was 10 years old. i moved to the east coast and lived there for six years and then fled back to california after high school. i went to school at uc santa barbara. i have been in san francisco since 1989, have lived in the excelsior since 1999. the difficulty is, muni often sees it as an industrial area,

not a neighborhood. we have to figure out how to make it work as a neighborhood and as a place that can service the light rail vehicles. i have had lots of different jobs. my main job has been doing social work for san francisco state university. i have been a community organizer, a social worker, but i have also been a legislative aide. i worked mostly for community- based organization supporting kids and families, working for labor. i got to see how city hall could be an effective tool to create change. i looked at running in 2007, 2008, and somehow i made it. i have been in politics for so many ways, doing work around central america, supporting people in central america against u.s. imperialism, their right to live, self determination. i did a lot of work on that on

campus when i was in college. a bit of work on apartheid when i was in college as well. >> i never got involved in supporting a candidate. i never thought a candidate was someone that i would support. then when tom ammiano ran against willie brown, i got inspired. i thought, someone with integrity and honesty, if they can run for mayor, maybe i can be somebody who represents what is true about our people. that is what inspired me to run and be a candidate. one thing this year that i really tackling, and i expect to for a long time, looking at me and how it operates in my district. san francisco, we talk about it being a transit first city, but it does not mean a lot if transit is not very well thought

out in places away from downtown. my district is where we need to create better options. all the way down to randall street, there is no accessible boarding areas for the church. there is a woman that lives in a wheelchair on santa rosa. she has to go across to glen park to get out transit. >> those new stations, those are the ones that we are going to have to depend on. >> along balboa park station, near geneva, i have been pushing hard to get ramps for pedestrians. right now, it is dangerous to cross the street. i want to insure the department of parking and traffic is painting lines on alemany street. beyond that, we need to figure out how to calm the traffic. a lot of cars go speeding through. sidewalks are not convenient for people. >> i